Thelema's lively, all admire, Her charms, but she's too full of fire; Impatience ever racks her breast, Her heart a stranger is to rest. A jocund youth of bulky size; This nymph beheld with tender eyes, From hers his humor differed quite, Black does not differ more from white. (Voltaire)

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Interesting - the more we know about this, the better we can fine tune meditation techniques for enlightenment... or mental health.

The study was conducted by the folks who sell Transcendental Meditation, so there is a bias - the paper largely seems to be an effort to include TM in future studies by creating "meditation categories," of which TM is one exemplar.

RESULTS VARY WITH DIFFERENT MEDITATION TECHNIQUES

As doctors increasingly prescribe meditation to patients for stress-related disorders, scientists are gaining a better understanding of how different techniques from Buddhist, Chinese, and Vedic traditions produce different results.

A new paper published in "Consciousness and Cognition" discusses three categories to organize and better understand meditation:

* Focused attention - concentrating on an object or emotion; * Open monitoring - being mindful of one's breath or thoughts; * Automatic self-transcending - meditations that transcend their own activity - a new category introduced by the authors.

Each category was assigned EEG bands, based on reported brain patterns during mental tasks, and meditations were categorized based on their reported EEG.

"The idea is that meditation is, in a sense, a 'cognitive task,' and EEG frequencies are known for different tasks," said Fred Travis, Ph.D., co-author, and Director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness, and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management.

Between categories, the included meditations differed in focus, subject/object relation, and procedures. These findings shed light on the common mistake of averaging meditations together to determine mechanisms or clinical effects.

"Meditations differ in both their ingredients and their effects, just as medicines do. Lumping them all together as "essentially the same" is simply a mistake," said Jonathan Shear, Ph.D., co-author, professor of philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and the author of several books and publications on meditation.

"Explicit differences between meditation techniques need to be respected when researching physiological patterns or clinical outcomes of meditation practices," said Dr. Travis. "If they are averaged together, then the resulting phenomenological, physiological, and clinical profiles cannot be meaningfully interpreted."